


Nor an Evil Tongue Bewitch

by WhenasInSilks



Series: Tumblr Fics [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coping, I mean, Kissing, M/M, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers-centric, Steve/wellness is really the main pairing but, Trauma, Tumblr Prompt, brief Steve/Bucky and Steve/Peggy, but Steve/Tony is the main pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 23:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15351510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: The thing about kisses is that they always come at the end of the story.Steve's life has had an awful lot of endings.





	Nor an Evil Tongue Bewitch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChibiSquirt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/gifts).



> Written for the [tumblr prompt](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/post/172452936735/tumblr-prompts-steve-smoochies-12) "Steve + anyone not evil + smoochies." Sorry I made it angsty. Thanks so much to [deathsweetqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathsweetqueen) and [enkiduu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enkiduu/pseuds/enkiduu) for betaing!

The thing about kisses is that they always come at the end of the story.

Steve's life has had an awful lot of endings.

* * *

The first time he kisses Bucky is just behind the front door of their apartment, an hour or so before the Stark Expo.

Bucky’s looking sharp as anything in his uniform, shrugging on his coat, jawing away as usual: “You’ll like this dame, I think. She’s a real firecracker, least that’s what Connie told me. God knows you’ll nee— _mmph_.”

This as Steve grabs him by the lapels of his coat, yanks him down, and lays one on him.

It’s not the sort of kiss a soldier usually takes to war—something soft, deep, passionate, and lingering, a remnant of home to carry on the lips and in the heart. It’s a fierce thing—awkward, too, all teeth and too much pressure. A kiss which is a war in and of itself.

Bucky takes a step back when Steve releases him, shoulders knocking against the wall, lifting his hand to his mouth, staring down at his fingers as though he expects to find blood there.

“What the— _what_ —?”

“For luck,” Steve tells him, tersely, and tosses him his peaked cap. “Now come on. Don’t want to keep the ladies waiting, do ya?”

Steve yanks the door open and precedes his friend into the hallway. When he licks his lips, he imagines it’s battle he tastes there.

* * *

Later that night, Steven Grant Rogers meets Abraham Erskine, and, give or take a few weeks, that’s the end of skinny Stevie Rogers, the asthmatic from Brooklyn. Give or take a few weeks, that’s the end of Abraham Erskine as well.

* * *

The second time, it’s Bucky who kisses him.

It’s winter in the mountains, and cold with it, even if cold doesn’t trouble him the way it used to. Looking back on this time, almost a century later, he won’t remember that. Perfect recall or not, there are some memories that fall away simply because there’s nowhere for them to fit. But it’s true enough, remembered or not: for a few short years of his life, winter couldn’t hold him.

Steve enters his quarters one night to find Bucky there waiting for him. He barely has time to register the sheen of sweat on Bucky’s forehead, the uneven rise and fall of his chest— _feverish_ , he thinks, his first and most constant fear, and then, _no, drunk_ —before Bucky is stumbling forward, rising on the balls of his feet (still so strange to think that he’s taller than Bucky now), and pressing his lips to Steve’s.

Steve thinks he must gasp, because the next moment Bucky is licking into his mouth. His body is cool and trembling to the touch, but his mouth is all heat. Steve recognizes the taste of brandy, even if he can no longer feel its burn.

He doesn’t move. His hands come up, almost of their own accord, and settle on Bucky’s shoulders, neither pulling him closer nor pushing him away. At first he has surprise as an excuse for the way he stands there, stiff as a post and twice as stupid, but each moment that passes, that excuse becomes less valid. Bucky’s tongue flickers like damp flame in his mouth as he pants and snuffles and groans down Steve’s throat.

Bucky is the one to pull away.

Steve just stands there, gaping.

“Buck,” he says, “Buck, I—”

Bucky snorts and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Steve wonders vaguely if he’d ever done that in front of the girls he used to kiss. He suspects not. Far too unrefined.

“I know,” Bucky says. “You and that Peggy dame, you— Well. But I figured, I owed you one.”

His lips twist in that old familiar smile, even if his eyes are different from the way Steve remembers. He throws up a jaunty salute. He leaves.

The next day it’s like nothing ever happened.

They prepare to zipline down onto a HYDRA train thundering through the mountains. Bucky accuses Steve of wanting revenge for past trips to Coney Island. Steve smiles, and doesn’t deny it.

Until…

Until one minute they’re fighting and throwing jokes and the next, there’s a hole the size of a tank in the side of the car.

Guns fire.

Bucky falls.

Steve watches him go, feeling the burn of Bucky’s lips on his like the memory of frost.

* * *

He kisses Peggy on the day he dies. Her lips are crimson, the color of blood half-dried. Steve has seen too many battlefields not to recognize the hue. Later, as the Valkyrie plummets towards icy waters, he wonders if he should have taken it as a sign.

He lifts his hand to his lips and comes away with a dark red smudge on his glove, the token Peggy’s lips had left him, and when he looks from the battle stains on his uniform to the smear of lipstick, the color is exactly the same.

Then again, Bucky’s lips hadn’t been red at all, and he had still fallen.

The plane shudders and lists. Through the cockpit, Steve can no longer see the sky—can see nothing but the ocean, fast approaching.

_And thus, with a kiss…_

* * *

Years pass.

Decades.

The world as Steve knows it dies, and a new one takes its place.

He sleeps through it all.

Waking in another century, he thinks on Peggy’s kiss and no longer knows whose ending it was.

He keeps touching his lips, that first day in the new millennium, staring down at the pale, unstained pads of his fingers, searching for any trace of color.

* * *

He dislikes Tony Stark before he even meets him, largely as a matter of principle, but when he first sees the metal suit hurtling down from the sky, he thinks he might have disliked Iron Man regardless of the man inside.

He’s developed something of an aversion to that particular shade of red.

* * *

Then he meets the man himself, and all of his preemptive dislike is justified three times over.

Stark makes his teeth grind and his hands itch. He’s spoiling for a fight, he’s downright thirsting for one, all he needs is an excuse—

Except then their city is under attack, and it’s not too long after that Iron Man is streaking towards the sky with an imperial ton of engineered death on his back.

“Stark, you know that’s a one-way trip,” he says, and gets no reply.

His last thought, as he watches Stark disappear through the hole in the world, as he watches him _die_ , like Erskine died, like Bucky died, like Peggy, is, absurdly—

_But I didn’t even—_

* * *

“Please tell me nobody kissed me,” Stark splutters at the sky, and Steve can’t help but smile. His own private joke. Not quite gallows humor, but a death row reprieve: Tony Stark is safe, alive, and unkissed. Steve thinks in that moment that he’ll not kiss Stark every single day if that’s what it takes.

Not like it’s a hardship.

* * *

 

* * *

Against all probability, not kissing Tony Stark is becoming a hardship.

It starts with the recognition, born shortly after the man damn near killed himself saving New York, that Tony’s sneering, quick-witted irreverence is just another kind of armor. Steve accused him, back on the helicarrier, of being the sort of man who would never lay down on the wire, and Tony all but _agreed_ with him. Steve was wrong about that, but Tony was lying. Who in the world lies about something like that?

Steve knows that not everyone fights with fists, that some people default to words as their weapon, but that’s not quite Tony either. Tony Stark has managed to weaponize his personality, and once Steve realizes _that_ , the Stark persona doesn’t have the same effect on him.

He and Tony become something very much like… _friends_.

The problem is, Tony is an exceptionally attractive man.

It’s not like Steve hadn’t noticed that from the start; it’s just that it seemed so very much of a piece with everything else he knew and despised about him. He was already an arrogant, obscenely wealthy, rude, drunken womanizer—a handsome face was all that was needed to complete the full package of “entitled ass.”

Except now Steve knows that that’s (mostly) a lie, and suddenly Tony’s attractiveness is much harder to dismiss. Steve finds himself noticing it at inopportune times—in the middle of debriefings, or during strategic discussions, or just after battles, or in the gym.

Luckily, there’s Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries and, more to the point, Tony’s girlfriend.

Which means that Tony is off limits.

Not that he wasn’t already, but now he’s… doubly so.

Which is for the best.

It’s safer that way.

The thought of safety has the acrid, burned-black tang of cowardice in the back of his mind, but he thinks maybe that’s okay. Maybe you’re allowed to be a coward, if you’re doing it for someone else.

Anyway, it’s better than the alternative.

Fear doesn’t have a flavor, or if it has, it’s only the flavor of ice, bright and numb—it tastes first like pain and then like nothing at all.

* * *

Sometimes when Steve wakes from dreams about drowning that become dreams about falling, it’s with the ghosts of century-old kisses on his lips.

He’s learned to make room for the ghosts. Sometimes it seems like they’re all he has left.

_Coppery blood and the richness of brandy. The muting burn of winter, and red lips, red lips, red—_

* * *

Steve dates.

He’s not a monk, or a prude, contrary to what—distressingly—seems to be the prevailing opinion.

He sticks to women, because it’s easier. With women, it’s only Peggy’s specter he has to contend with, rather than the memory of Bucky and the reality of Tony.

They’re smart, because he likes clever people, and gutsy, because he’s always admired that, and pretty, because he likes to think he’s not shallow but he’s not exactly made of stone either.

He doesn’t kiss a single one of them.

Some of his dates are hurt by this, or embarrassed. Some simply smile—in relief? with regret?—and tell him it was nice getting to know him and they wish him the best.

Some are offended.

“What the hell do you think this is, _Pretty Woman_?” Connie demands as she escorts him unceremoniously from her apartment. She’s a lawyer. He’d met her at the laundromat. He’d liked her a lot.

He looks up _Pretty Woman_ when he gets home.

It… explains a lot, actually, especially about the fourth most common reaction among his dates.

“Oh, so _that’s_ what this is,” pink-haired Rachel says with an arched brow and a wicked grin. “You should’ve said.”

Afterwards, they tell him they had fun, the Rachels of the world. Most of them seem like they mean it. Some of them ask him to call. “Next time you’re in town,” they say, which confuses him, because he _lives_ in New York, or “if you’re in the mood to Netflix and chill.”

Sometimes he does.

It satisfies one sort of ache, but opens another, deep and raw in his chest.

* * *

Tony and Pepper aren’t particularly demonstrative, as couples go. Tony, Steve has found, can be a surprisingly private person, and Pepper Potts is nothing if not discreet.

Still, Steve can’t help seeing things, sometimes. It’s inevitable, with all of them living in the tower together. Never anything compromising, just… little things. Quiet moments of intimacy. The way Tony’s eyes follow Pepper whenever she’s in the room. The way his razor-edged smiles smooth into something tender. The way their fingers brush, twice, three times, before lacing together as they walk.

He only ever sees them kiss once.

It happens like this:

There’s a mission. The team has assembled in the quinjet hangar, bar one, and once again, Steve has been volunteered for “Stark wrangling duty.”

“We took a vote,” Bruce says, apologetic.

“You’re the only one he ever listens to,” Clint adds.

Natasha only smiles. “Up and at ’em, soldier boy.”                                                                                                                  

And it’s not like he minds, at least not until the point where he’s standing, frozen in the doorway, as, unmindful of observers, Tony drifts and sways towards Pepper like a leaf caught on the tide.

“—back before you know it,” he’s saying. “You won’t even have time to miss me.”

“I never do,” Pepper says, but her smile gives her words the lie.  

Tony curls his arms around her waist like they’re dancing as she leans forward and presses her lips to his, lingering and sweet.

Steve’s breath catches in his throat.

Pepper pulls back, tucking a loose strand of red-blonde hair behind her ear, and murmurs, soft enough that only a super soldier could have heard from where Steve is standing, “If you miss Thursday’s stockholder meeting, I’ll skin you and have new pumps made out of your hide.”

Tony’s smile is crooked and fond and _real_ in a way that is all too rare. “And people think _I’m_ the kinky one,” he says, and brushes another kiss over her lips.

And Steve’s own lips are burning and something is twisting, tight, _tight_ in his gut, because he knows he can’t have this but just at this moment he can’t remember why. Kisses might mean an ending, but what does he have, exactly, that he’s so afraid of losing?

Inside the room, Tony tries to deepen the kiss, and Pepper is twisting away, laughing, more hair tumbling loose from its clip.

Steve turns his back. Walks away. Tony will be coming along soon; he’s said as much to Pepper, and Steve is surplus to requirements.

In the hallway he stops and, in obedience to a sudden and irresistible impulse, reels back and hits the wall hard, putting almost his full strength behind the blow. Unfortunately, Tony’s post-Loki home improvements included an attempt to Hulk-proof the walls, and it’s Steve’s knuckles that give, the skin splitting painfully at the point of impact. Steve stares down at the blood beginning to blossom on those first two points of bone.

Unthinkingly, he raises his knuckles to his lips, sucks away pain and salt and heat. He lowers his hand, staring down at the wet smear his mouth has left, and pictures his own lips, the way they must, even now, be gleaming cherry red.

He wipes them clean on the back of his hand and yanks on his gloves. By the time he takes them off again, the wounds will be gone as if they’d never existed. He wonders if it’s a consequence of Erskine’s formula, or if it’s always been true, that the marks that linger are never the ones you can see.

* * *

Peggy and Bucky still visit him in his dreams. They look at him with cold, dead eyes, fluttering over his body with cold, dead hands, blistering his skin with kisses cool as ice.

Sometimes when he wakes, he bites down on the inside of his cheek until blood begins to flow, warm and salty and bitter.

 _I’m alive_ , he thinks at the darkness, fists clenching at the sheets. _I’m alive_.

* * *

Tony and Pepper split up.

Steve feels a sick, guilty satisfaction over it, and an even sicker flutter of apprehension at the layer of protection stripped away. No Pepper for Steve to chastise himself with as he holds vigil with Tony in the long nights following the break-up, Tony’s eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion but still so very bright as he spills confessions into the darkness: “I wish” and “I should have” and “maybe in another world,” words so familiar that all Steve can think to do is sit and keep his silence (and ache, and _ache_ ). Tony raises a tumbler of scotch and Steve watches his throat work in the half-light as he swallows. When he sets his hand back down, it’s barely a finger’s width away from Steve’s own, and no Pepper to make a barrier between them.

As the days turn into weeks, something begins to shift in the way Tony looks at him. Something speculative enters his eye, followed by a growing intentness. He touches Steve more—little, casual things that make Steve’s heart clench with something between terror and longing. He flirts like he’s always flirted, almost indiscriminately and with a brash, half-ironic ease that should be far less charming than it is, but sometimes now when it’s directed at Steve there’s a questioning lilt in his voice, like he’s sung the first part of a duet and is waiting for Steve to come in on the response.

Steve looks away, shuts his eyes and thinks about Bucky’s face as his hand slipped from Steve’s, as he was lost to the air and the snow and the fall. Reminds himself of all the reasons why this—why _Tony_ —is something he can never have.

He retreats to the gym.

 _I’m alive,_ he thinks, fists pounding into the heavy bag, left, right, left, right. With every shock of impact that jars him to the bone, _I’m alive_.

* * *

Tony’s a hell of a fighter in the suit, but Steve’s never seen him fight out of it, so he does what any good team leader would do (at least, any good leader of a team containing Tony Stark) and pokes and prods and needles Tony’s ego until Tony agrees to a sparring session out of costume.

As it turns out, this is a colossal mistake.

Because it turns out Tony wasn’t bragging when he said he knew what he was doing with hand-to-hand combat. He’s nowhere near Steve’s level of course—Steve puts him down with ease—but he’s good enough to surprise Steve with a sweep of the legs that sends Steve crashing to his knees. Tony tries to scramble out from underneath him, but Steve is too fast; he rolls them both over, a full three hundred and sixty degrees, and pins Tony to the ground, and that’s when the situation goes completely FUBAR, because now Tony’s chest is pressed up against his, both of them heaving with exertion, battling breath for breath.

Tony’s cheeks are flushed; his eyes are wide and dark. He parts his lips as if to speak and Steve’s eyes drop immediately to his mouth. Tony’s tongue darts out to moisten his lips. Steve’s heart is pounding in his ears.

“To hell with it,” Tony mutters, and then he’s lifting his head off the mat—

Steve rolls off him and gets to his feet, holding out a hand to help Tony up. Tony’s eyes narrow. After a moment, he takes it.

“You’ve got some good moves,” Steve says, to break the silence, and immediately regrets it, because he’s not sure he can weather the innuendo that’s sure to follow.

But all Tony says is, “Thanks.” He smiles a close-mouthed smile. “I think I’m gonna pack it in. Lot to get done today. I’ll be in the showers if you need me.” There’s not even a hint of innuendo in his tone.

Numbly, Steve watches him go. He waits until he hears the distant hiss of the shower starting before he turns and walks to the mirror, leans his head against the glass…

 _I’m alive_ , he thinks, and this time, something in him answers.

_Are you?_

* * *

 

* * *

It’s summer when Steve dies for the second time. The sky is clear, the sun shining overhead, bright as a new penny. It strikes him at the time, not as a conscious thought—the time between the final blow and his losing consciousness is too short for that—but as a vague but pervasive feeling of incongruity. It feels somehow wrong, to be dying with the sun warming his skin. Death for him has always been something cold.

Some people might call it a good death. Those people aren’t soldiers. Steve doesn’t believe in good deaths; the best anyone can hope for is a necessary one. But he dies taking a shot that was meant for Tony, and he guesses that’s about as necessary as you can get.

Apart from that, it’s an ordinary day.

As darkness begins to cloud around his eyes, he remembers another death, the smear of red on his lips like the seal of a promise.

He hasn’t been kissed in almost a century.

He can hear Tony shouting, somewhere in the background. There are sirens in the distance.

 _I wish_ , he thinks, and then he doesn’t think anything anymore.

* * *

It’s raining. Someone is holding him. It’s almost like being a child again, the way they rock him back and forth, except for the snuffling whimpers, the almost animal noises of pain.

“God dammit, Steve, not like this. You bastard, you goddamned son of a bitch, not like this,” they are saying as water drips down onto his face.

Someone is holding him and they are raining. No, crying.

Someone is holding him and they are crying.

Who knew death could be so wet?

Steve opens his eyes.

Tony is looking down at him.

His face is bruised; his eyes are red and brimming. He looks awful.

He looks beautiful.

Tony’s mouth falls open.

Steve licks papery dry lips.

“Did we win?” he rasps.

“Did we—” Tony echoes, before breaking off. He shakes his head. “You—”

Steve has only a moment to marvel at this wonder of the modern world—Tony Stark at a loss for words—and then Tony’s mouth is on his. His lips are chapped and so are Steve’s and they sort of catch and scrape, and Tony’s breath is terrible, it tastes like something _died_ in there, or maybe that’s Steve, and Steve sobs into Tony’s mouth and drinks and drinks and _drinks_ until he’s well nigh drowning.

“I watched you die, you asshole,” Tony breathes. “Your heart stopped. Don’t you _ever_ do that to me again.”

 _Wrong order_ , Steve thinks, dizzily, pressing his hand to his lips.

“I take it that’s a yes, then,” he hears himself say.

“Unbelievable,” Tony says, but he doesn’t say it like it’s a bad thing. Just like it’s true. He bows his head down and for a moment Steve thinks he’s going to kiss him again. His heart leaps into his throat, but Tony just tucks his face into the crook of Steve’s shoulder and begins sucking in air in long, shuddering gasps.

Steve hesitantly lets his arm slide up Tony’s, and rests it on his shoulder. Watches his fingers splay on the gleaming red of the armor as Tony shakes in his arms. To think, that something so strong could be so fragile. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

 _Unbelievable_.

He shuts his eyes and tilts his face up towards the sky.

* * *

Steve is sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, carefully pulling the IV from his arm when Tony walks into the room.

“Should you be doing that?”

“Probably not,” Steve says. He’s a little amazed at how steady his voice sounds.

Tony cocks his head to one side, then gives a short nod, accepting the answer.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” he says abruptly. “About— It was out of line. I know you’re not interested, so maybe if we can just forget about it—”

“No.”

“Just chalk it up to the heat of the— What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I don’t want to forget about it.”

He’s spent so long living in memories. It’s past time he started making new ones.

A smile is pushing at the corners of his mouth. Uncertain. Hopeful.

He reaches out a hand.

Tony stares at it; at him. Gives a shaky laugh and rakes his fingers through his hair.

“You’ve got a hell of a sense of timing.”

“You started it.”

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” Tony protests, sounding almost indignant, but he takes a step forward.

Steve’s smile widens; he can’t help himself.

“I’m not,” he says, and the sound of his own voice is like a revelation, the conviction that rings out clear and true.

His gaze drops to Tony’s lips.

The old fear is still there, lancing through his stomach, jagged as ice, but his heart’s still beating and Tony is standing just before him and Steve is so very tired of running.

He lifts his chin, craning upwards. He’s a tall man, these days at least, but he’s still seated and Tony is standing and by himself he can’t quite manage to bridge the distance.

It doesn’t matter.

Tony meets him halfway.

It tastes like a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> You ask how many of your kisses, Lesbia,  
> would be enough and more than enough.  
> As great a number as the Libyian sands  
> that lie at silphium-bearing Cyrene  
> between the oracle of sweltering Jove  
> and the sacred sepulchre of old Battis,  
> or as many as the stars which, when the night is silent,  
> watch over the secret loves of men:  
> so many kisses for you to kiss  
> are enough and more than enough for mad Catullus,  
> kisses which neither can the curious count  
> nor an evil tongue bewitch.
> 
> _Catullus 7_
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [whenas-in-silks](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/) or at my marvel-centric blog, [sister-stark](http://sister-stark.tumblr.com/).


End file.
